St John's College
Roxanne's report #5
October 14, 2005

Hello again, everyone!

It's been another busy and exciting week here at St. John's. To begin with, we had a 4-day weekend last Friday - Monday. And this was very nearly a downfall for me. Although I was at the Annapolis Boatshow [working for Womanship] and busy with studying, I almost had some free time. And I didn't have a plan for it. It didn't help that the entire campus had effectively shut down as all the underclassmen went home for the weekend. So that was a little lonely, and scary, but it turned out okay. (Plus, it rained really hard the whole time. Bad for walking commuters...like me.) It's starting to look like fall around here. I can wear scarves and jackets, not only with impudence, but out of necessity. (It's funny seeing how Johnnies react to the rain...Some ignore it. Many don a hoodie [hooded sweatshirt] or hat. Some, not all, have umbrellas or galoshes, and a large number break out their trenchcoats.) The leaves are falling, the wind's picking up, and all the shops along the waterfront have orange in their display cases. In my lab class on Thursday, the lab assistant (A real phlebotomist! Wow!) made tasty wheat muffins with . . . pumpkin butter. Everyone was eating them, saying "mmm, tasty," when suddenly one of the students exclaimed, "This muffin tastes like Fall!" (And we were awed that our lab assistant had the power of baking the flavor of Fall.) They were amazing muffins!

We're looking at Harvey in lab [William Harvey (1578-1657): Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals], so our last two dissections have been on the heart. The one we did earlier this week was a "sheep pluck", which is when they, um . . . reach in and pluck out part of the sheep. The heart and lungs, more precisely. And not only was this great because we finally got a whole piece of heart, but we also had lungs to play with which are squishy and reddish! It was a good lab, mostly because we had a good dissection, but we also squirted water around trying to find passages through the heart and had fun poking the lungs and blowing them up with air. (Which looks really weird, like watching a lump of hamburger try to come back from the dead.) Then there was Propostition 8 from book 3 of Euclid, which is long and looks somewhat intimidating. And it was my turn to demonstrate, and the class bet Mr. Reader's hair that I wouldn't be able to do it, but I did and it took six minutes and four colors of chalk, so Mr. Reader really could use a haircut now. Then, something else cool happened in seminar while we were reading in Herodotus, which was that everyone opened their mouth! And we were happy and cheered the last guy to talk because he hadn't said anything on any reading until then. (The way it happened was actually kind of funny, bu . . . it doesn't seem to seem so funny, um, outside of those twenty people. But we did get a good laugh from Mr. Yee's Greek Herodotus.)

Stuff like this would happen:

Miss Brann: So, Mr. Yee, is the word in Herodotus actually hubris?
Mr. Yee: No, it's . . . not in the lexicon.
Me: It must be really bad!
Miss Harrison: Yeah, unspeakably bad!

(HUGE laughs.) There was another place where we got some giggles out of Xerxes army being referred to as "anthropos" instead of "andros," apparently too wimpy to deserve the more "masculine" word. Ha ha ha!

One more school thing I want to mention is that I finally understand some really really basic music theory, and that makes me feel good. Actually, learning it was almost exactly the same as learning Greek. So now that I can understand it as being something like a foreign language, all kinds of things start to make sense. It's really incredible.

One random good thing that happened this week: The fifth grade science class at West Annapolis watched a Bill Nye video during their class! It made me feel hope for the future of science.

Random evil thing: Skim milk in a half-and-half container. SO EVIL!
Thank you for reading, everyone! Have a great week!

-- Roxanne